The 3am Version of Building a Business – Bidemi Oke
There was a stretch where I would wake up at 3am, heart going, before I even remembered why. Then I would remember payroll, or a number that wasn’t moving, or a conversation I had been avoiding. I would lay there running through it by myself because everyone who needed me to have it together was asleep and calling someone felt like admitting I didn’t.
This isn’t about sympathy. It is an invitation, because almost nobody in this space says it plainly. We talk about runway, churn, the hardest hiring call we made. We rarely talk about how frightened we actually are, and maybe it’s time more of us did, not to make it the headline, just to admit it’s there.
At FlashChange and with every founder I sit across from, I see the same fear wearing different clothes. The businesses look nothing alike. The fear underneath is identical: the fear of being the ‘problem’, the reason it doesn’t work, carried silently, every day, by people who smile through the next meeting like nothing is wrong. I have worn that smile. I know what it costs to hold it in place for eight hours straight.
What unsettles me now isn’t that the fear exists. It is how completely we have all agreed to hide it from each other. The founder across the table at dinner, laughing at the right moments, talking growth with total confidence, is very possibly one bad week from breaking. So am I, some weeks. Neither of us says it, and we leave dinner a little more alone than we arrived.
Silence is where the real damage happens. Fear, named, loses some of its grip the moment it leaves your mouth. I have felt that relief myself, the few times I risked it. Fear swallowed doesn’t disappear, it relocates. It became a sharper word than I meant to say to someone who didn’t deserve it. It became a decision made in panic instead of patience. It became a body that started failing in ways no medicine could fix, because I haven’t given myself permission to sit with the thing underneath.
There is a toxic strain of startup culture that treats exhaustion as proof of seriousness, and I want no part of spreading it. Rest matters, boundaries matter, a hollowed-out founder isn’t more committed, just more broken, and broken people make broken decisions. The pain worth honouring is the honest ache of building something real, not a performance staged for an audience I have made up in my head.
The real problem isn’t that this hurts. I learned that part alone, at night, later than I should have asked for help. The problem is how long I decided the hurt was something to hide, even from people who loved me, which meant it never actually left. It just sat there while I kept smiling in the group photo.
I think of the founders I have watched come apart, not because the work broke them, but because they never let anyone see it breaking them. They performed certainty until they couldn’t and by then there was no version of themselves left that remembered how to ask.
The ones who survive the hardest stretch aren’t the ones who feel the least. They are the ones who stop hiding it and say it to someone, before it turns into something heavier than pain. I know, because I have done both. Hidden, it isolates you completely. Spoken, even once, it starts to move.
So here is a question worth sitting with, not answering out loud: next time it feels truly unbearable, will you speak up, or will you just know better and stay silent anyway?
About the Author
Bidemi Oke is the Chief Executive Officer of FlashChange , a fintech platform focused on secure digital asset exchange. He is an entrepreneur and vibrant leader, recognised for driving innovation and redefining access in the financial technology industry.
